Vascular diseases, caused by a gradual accumulation of plaque on the walls of blood vessels, are among the leading causes of death in North America and around the globe. The diseases consist of carotid artery narrowing that can lead to embolism, a dislodgement of plaque fragments, which travel to the brain causing strokes.
Sonography is an ultrasound-based imaging technique and is generally used for imaging soft tissues of the body. Typically, a transducer is used to scan the body of a patient. An ultrasound image of body tissues, blood vessels and organs is produced from ultrasound echoes received by the transducer. Feature descriptors of shape, contour, margin of imaged masses, echogenicity and velocity are generally used in diagnosis of medical ultrasound images. Sonography has been shown to be an effective blood vessel imaging modality.
Ultrasound provides a non-invasive means for visualizing various tissues within the human body and it has been successfully used as an early detection and diagnosis of the accumulation of plaque in blood vessels. By detecting the exact location, shape and morphology of the plaque, the ultrasound imaging modality not only improves the patient's prognosis, but also lowers the overall cost of their treatment. However, the ultrasound images tend to be filled with speckle noise and other artifacts, due to the sporadic nature of high frequency sound waves.
By analyzing the ultrasound images, a professional is able to estimate the accumulation of plaque at various locations in the blood vessel. However, this requires manually comparing several ultrasound images and determining whether narrowing of a blood vessel as shown in an image is due to plaque, another cause, or measurement error.
It is an object of the present invention to mitigate or obviate at least one of the above mentioned challenges.